"Needlessly" can be in the eye of the beholder, but given that Linus basically put it together to solve the problem he was trying to solve without consulting a UX team or building a product for the ages, I would be willing to place my probability bar pretty high on the design tilting towards "One person's best idea right now" over "Best design theoretically possible."

That having been said, the team is really good at engines so the software is quite good at doing what it's supposed to do.